In its show of new works by master photo-illusionist Vik Muniz, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. has given over its main gallery to “Surfaces,” a series of colorful photocollages in which the artist has cut up images of modernist abstractions before randomly reassembling them and rephotographing the result. He repeats the process, leaving the final products with details that are incised into or raised from the picture’s actual surface. It’s a clever idea—Auxerre, after Hans Hofmann, Surfaces, for instance, seems to literalize the eponymous painter’s theories of optical “push and pull”—but one that feels conceptually thin while adding nothing to our understanding of the original works or their afterlives as reproductions.
The real attraction here, “Museum of Ashes,” occupies two back rooms, painted a somber gray and installed with pieces that depict art and artifacts—a dinosaur skeleton, a Greek vase, pre-Columbian pottery, insect specimens—destroyed in a fire that consumed Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum, a 200-year-old structure in the artist’s native Brazil that had been left in serious disrepair. Muniz offers photographs taken of his drawings of the lost objects, rendered with ash and debris from the museum’s ruins. Also included are sculptural replicas of the items that are partially formed out of cinders from the same site. Muniz’s project memorializes a tragic loss of irreplaceable history and culture. As an act of public mourning, it may be his most melancholy and affecting work yet. As a record of a catastrophe caused by willful neglect, it’s devastating.